Chapter 5580: A Message From Father!
Chapter 5580: A Message From Father!
<Jarl Skallagrim>
In the boundless darkness between Dimensions, the Steed stopped.
It had not wavered in all the crossings behind them, the last of his eight, running on the hope he had whipped into it, following a scent that no distance had managed to thin. It simply stopped, mid-stride, in the middle of nothing, and stood trembling in its chains!
"Why have we stopped," Jarl Skallagrim said. It was not a question as really, questions implied patience and he had fucking none.
The Steed’s voice came up to him small and confused, a mountain speaking like a child.
"She is gone."
"Gone."
"I can no longer sense Hvitrmarr. Her trail did not thin, Jarl. It did not turn. It..." The great head swung slowly in the dark, searching. "It ceased. As if she stopped existing anywhere my senses can reach. There is nowhere the scent goes. There is only where it was."
Skallagrim sat very still upon his throne-saddle, rot ticking quietly along his fissures, and consulted his lucidity at this time.
Scents did not cease. Beings fled, veiled, died, and every one of those left a shape in the weavings. A ceasing left nothing, and nothing was not a thing that existence produced on its own. Something had been done to her. Something outside his considerable education, and he was fucking educated!
But...
They were close. He knew they were close. In this fold of the dark there were fewer than seven Dimensions within reach as they had been inches away!
The few nearby they were heading towards were...THE Cajaman. THE Tisana. THE Ymnaros. A few others, lesser and stranger. She should be inside one of them. The thing that had ceased her scent was inside one of them!
He would pass by each of them in turn to ensure he found them.
His whip-arm moved, and the lash of woven curse-light cracked across the Steed’s flank!
CRACK!
"Go towards THE Cajaman Dimension, for now," Jarl Skallagrim said. "We will find them. Even if we have to search one Dimension at a time. You have carried me this far on hope, little steed. Carry me the rest of the way on certainty..."
The Steed gathered itself, and ran.
And as they went, deep in the crossing-dark, Jarl Skallagrim twitched.
It began as a wrongness at his brow, a heat with a shape to it, and then an obsidian mark surfaced on the skin of his forehead, black lines assembling into an old, old seal, and the weight that came through it bent him forward over his saddle-throne and tore a bellow out of him that rolled away unanswered into the dark!
"NNGH... AAAAGH!"
The Steed faltered beneath him, feeling it, whatever it was, bleeding down through the chains.
Then the weight passed. Skallagrim hung there a moment, breathing through the last of it.
And he raised his head, and laughed in astonishment.
"HAHAHA! Oh. Oh, now this. Now THIS!"
The Steed below him trembled in fear, but it still asked!
"Jarl... what has happened to you?"
Skallagrim wiped at his mouth. When he spoke, his voice had that texture the eight had learned to dread more than his whip, the mad cadence with the terrible lucid stillness underneath, a man singing over the top of his own dying weavings.
"Little steed, you don’t know this, but us Descendants are unique beings," he said. "You were bred. We were spoken. A Descendant is a sentence with a bloodline, and every sentence has a speaker, and our speakers are Those Who Remain. Our Fathers."
He tapped the fading obsidian mark on his brow. "And we can receive messages, directly, from our Fathers. It is our oldest inheritance. Older than our strength. Older than our curse."
He settled back on the throne, warming to the telling the way he warmed to nothing else.
"Do you know what those messages are like? I have collected the accounts my whole life, the way beggars collect glimpses through feast-hall windows. For the favored lines, the messages come often. Commands, mostly. A Father points, and the line moves."
" Some receive blessings through the mark, gifts of authority poured straight into the blood. Some receive dreams, whole nights spent walking the memories of their ancestor, and they wake weeping at the size of what they come from. Some lines receive only a single word once a generation, and they build entire civilizations around each word. And some," his grin widened, crooked, "some receive silence. Lifelong, perfect, complete silence. Because a Father speaks when a Father has use for you, and not one heartbeat before."
He spread his arms to the dark.
"I have never received a message. Not once. All my life. THE Sleepless Fiend, my very own ancestor, the speaker of my line, and in all my centuries of dying, through every experiment, every steed, every year I carved off my own span hunting a way out of the sentence he wrote me into, I never heard so much as a syllable. I used to pray for the mark to burn, little steed, when I was young and still stupid enough to pray. Silence. Always silence. I stopped fighting my madness partly to spite that silence. Let him inherit a lunatic, I thought. Ha!"
His laughter faded to something quieter and far worse.
"And yet, just now, I heard this voice for the first time."
He touched his brow again, almost gently.
"And do you know the most ridiculous part? It was not even addressing me. Not me, Skallagrim, his son’s son’s son, dying in his name. It went out to all of us at once, a broadcast to the whole bloodline, the way a lord posts a bounty in a market square. It simply said: the White Steed has been cured. Find information. Uncover how she was cured, and the one who cured her. Deliver this, and your life will be extended. You shall have....salvation."
...!
The Steed’s body trembled!
Skallagrim leaned back and laughed at the roof of the dark, and there was no joy anywhere in the sound, only astonishment sharpened into something with edges.
"Haha! How ridiculous is that? A thousand years I begged existence for exactly two things. Salvation, or a single word from my Father. And I received neither, and I made my peace, I chose to watch, I chose the madness, I let go of salvation with both hands. And it was AFTER I let go of it that my Father finally wants to send me a message, to grant me one! Not for my sake. Never for my sake. Because his little cured steed interests something in his long, long game, and now the dying sons are useful, now the silence breaks! HAHA!"
His fists closed on the chains until his knuckles split, rot weeping from the fissures, and his voice dropped through the laughter into the truest register he owned.
"I hate them. I hate Those Who Remain so much. So much!" A breath came. The grin returned, dreadful and bright and filled with magisterial madness. "Haha..."
...!